A love story
by rhoddlet
Summary: Swedish boys in Spain. Non-explicit H/D SLASH.


A love story.  
  
by rhoddlet  
  
rhoddlet@hotmail.com.  
  
PG. No bad words. Plenty of obsession.  
  
They're not mine. JKR and Scholastic and TimeWarner and all 'dem.  
  
Thanks to everybody who reviewed this on my livejournal (http://www.livejournal.com/users/rhoddlet/). The fic arose while reading Olympia's sequel to the Shining Prince and while RP'ing for the HP-LJ (http://www.livejournal.com/community/hogwarts_online/). Guess who I play.  
  
*  
  
Spain. Early summer: the seashore.  
  
Draco Malfoy is coming into his inheritance as a Malfoy, and in a way, he is more a Malfoy than his father ever was -- that pale hair, the white fingers, and even the ambition slowly kindling in him. Narcissa knew Lucius's father, and she knows that no true Malfoy is ever second-born. No Malfoy ever acquires it by the death of another; she loves Lucius, has loved him since she was eight years old and he was four, but he was the second son of Verginius, by his second wife, and thus second-best in his father's heart.  
  
Narcissa has always wondered what Lucius would do if she died. If she had died that one winter day when the Aurors came to Hogwarts, would he have married her sister instead? If she'd been caught and sent to Akzaban, if they had believed him when he claimed to be acting under Imperius but hadn't believed it for her? If the Aurors had known a little more about her family, if they'd done their research a little more thoroughly?  
  
She was the one who brought Lucius into this mess all those years ago, Narcissa thinks, pulling her left glove off and folding it in her hand. Funny how he's sent her and Draco away because he thinks that he and distance can protect them from the storm in England -- but you'd only have to take a look at Draco to know that he couldn't have anything to do with Voldemort. What mother would let a son like that risk his life?  
  
Tall and slim, and strong and straight, with hair cut low over the eyes, his mother's voice and his grandmother's way of walking. Narcissa is the one with veela blood in her: the Malfoys are nothing but pale and Saxon, and her ancestors are the ones who lived five hundred years. Her aunt is the one who could turn into a bird and rip a man's arms from his body with her mouth, and Narcissa is the one who stood in the family treasury and held a foot-long feather to her hair and realized that they were quite the same color.  
  
Draco is handsome boy and even handsomer because of the way he's dressed. White collared shirt, black pants, barefoot in the sand, and the wind flapping in his hair -- it's darker than hers, he's darker all around, but he's gotten to look much more like her as he's grown. She used to hold him up in the mirror next to her and think, with a sudden wrench of sadness, that he could be anybody's son, really. Lucius could have married anyone and gotten that pale hair and soft mouth, and she was quite bitter that they'd taken even her son from her, but when she was watching Draco get dressed last night, Narcissa realized that Draco's become much more of her son than Lucius's.  
  
He loves her of course, and he loves his father in his own tormented teenage way, but the way he snarls and snaps and roils with hatred -- Narcissa recognizes it as the way she used to be when she was younger. Heaping scorn on his father, talking trash about Muggles and mudbloods, and Narcissa pretends not to recognize the owl that huffs its way over the Atlantic once a week or the little box of fetishes that her son keeps under the bed because, oh yes, her son loves Potter the same way his father loved Potter. But Lucius would mope and sulk about it, and there her son is standing on the beach with the wind flapping in his clothes and smiling at this pretty Swedish boy whose family is also staying at the hotel.  
  
A quarrel erupts a few days later when the Swedish boy comes up to their rooms and finds that Draco is with a pretty waitress from the cafeteria. "Don't you know the diseases you can catch from them?"  
  
Narcissa barely hears Draco's low, cool tones through the thick masonry, but she can guess what he says to Dagny. Half an hour later, even, Draco risks sending his own private owl out with a message, and in the next room, Narcissa brings it back with a spelled lure and the catch word.  
  
The message is to Potter of course. It is blotched with tears and hastily written on a piece of hotel paper -- signed too, and Narcissa puckers her lips in irritation when she sees that. So she takes a fine, sharp knife and cuts off the bottom: also, trims the hotel seal off the top, then re-ties the message around the owl's leg and sends him off across the Atlantic.  
  
Later, on the train, in the hot yellow sunshine and dust from the plain, Narcissa watches Draco's lips move in his sleep, and she whispers the words of his letters back to him. I love you. I will die without you: what do you see in that Mudblood Granger, that nasty little Weasley? Forget her, and my father will love you, and I will love you.  
  
No-one means anything to you but me; the summers are horrible without you. Is it hot in England? I love you. Do you remember me? You must remember me; I thought I'd burned the memory of me into your skin, and you'd said so.  
  
Draco does not actually say so, but Narcissa knows that Potter must have made some kind of promise. With his hands and eyes, maybe, if not his lips, and Draco must have sworn something, given him something in return.  
  
The absence of it haunts him on that long train-ride and in the plain- cities. He eats little, sleeps uneasily, and looks back at Narcissa with eyes the same color as the dust-dry plain outside.  
  
Potter does not send any owls back. He is busy, Narcissa guesses -- who knows if the little mudblood that Potter loves is even alive anymore? Under strict instructions from Lucius, Narcissa has avoided sending a single letter home, avoided reading a single newspaper or listening to a single radio broadcast. She would keep newspapers from Draco, but she suspects that he doesn't read them anyway.  
  
Even his sulking is different from Lucius's, Narcissa thinks with a smile as she watches Draco snarl and refuse food. Lucius would have sulked, gone to his room and taken long baths, but Draco is practically incandescent with anger. Narcissa buys him a pack of unmarked, blank paper she has shipped to her from France and leaves it by his plate at breakfast. He gives her a sudden suspicious look, but she just gives him her whitest smile.  
  
Two weeks later.  
  
They are in Granada, staying with the de Molinas. Twilight, and the old Moorish quarter is laid out underneath Draco's feet on their rooftop -- the Sierra behind him, the well-watered plain in front of him, and the sky going purple at the edges. Narcissa hitches up her skirts and climbs up the dusty old tower and finds her son standing on the edge, hands on his hips, squinting off into the distance.  
  
His skin is actually a little darker than it used to be, but his hair is bleached sugar-white, and there are new muscles on his arms when he helps her up the last step.  
  
"Going back to Hogwarts is going to be hard after this summer," he says.  
  
Narcissa smiles and puts her arm on the crook of his elbow. She thinks of the secret tiled pools in the palace of the Alhambra, their echoing ceilings and deep stillness, and she decides that they have nothing on her Draco, who has eyes like the sun, hair like snow on the mountain, a heart as cold as the latter and as fierce as the former.  
  
*  
  
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